A helpdesk for the shared mailbox your customers already use
Every email to your shared support address becomes a ticket with the right customer, a priority and an SLA clock. Your team works a queue instead of an inbox, and your customers carry on emailing exactly as they do now.
Where a shared inbox lets you down
A shared inbox works until it gets busy. Two people answer the same email, or nobody does because each assumed the other had it. An urgent request sits under forty routine ones until someone scrolls far enough to find it.
It also cannot tell you anything afterwards. When a customer asks why they waited two days, the answer is somewhere in a thread, if anyone can find it.
Dispatch Layer sits in front of the mailbox rather than replacing it. The address stays the same and the inbox becomes a queue with owners, deadlines and a history.
From email to ticket
The email arrives
Dispatch Layer checks your shared mailbox every sixty seconds. On our first live customer the median time from email to ticket is under a minute.
It is read and sorted
Each message is classified against your own categories, matched to the customer who sent it and given a priority. Anything unclear goes to a review queue for a person to decide.
A ticket opens
The ticket carries an SLA clock taken from that customer's contract and lands in the right queue, or with a named engineer where your routing rules say so.
Your team works the queue
Everyone can see what is open and who has it. Replies go out from the shared mailbox, and the customer's answer comes back onto the same ticket.
Step two is where the AI does its work. See how the AI ticket triage works.
What changes for the team
Every email has an owner
Nothing sits unread because the person who normally picks it up is on site or on leave. Unassigned work is visible to the whole team.
Deadlines you can see
Each ticket shows how long is left on its SLA, and a breached ticket is flagged so it does not slip past. The workboard puts the highest priority work first.
One thread per job
Replies are attached to the ticket they belong to. Nobody has to search the inbox to find what was said last week.
A record you can show
Every ticket has a timestamped history of when the request arrived and when it was answered, which is the question that comes up in any dispute or audit.
Who uses it
IT service desks and MSPs whose clients email a support address rather than log into a portal. The ticket knows which client sent it and which contract applies, so the SLA is the one you actually agreed.
Field service businesses where requests arrive from facilities managers, managing agents and end customers in the same inbox, such as fire and security contractors and reactive maintenance teams. If you run Simpro, a ticket that turns out to be real work becomes a Simpro job in one action, and the job's stage comes back onto the ticket. See the Simpro integration.
Common questions
- Do our customers have to change how they contact us?
- No. They keep emailing the same address. Dispatch Layer reads the shared mailbox behind it, so there is no portal to push and no new address to announce.
- Which mailboxes are supported?
- Microsoft 365 shared mailboxes, connected through the Microsoft Graph API. There are no forwarding rules and nothing to change in your mail flow. Google Workspace is on the roadmap but not available today.
- What happens when a customer replies to an existing ticket?
- The reply joins the ticket it belongs to rather than opening a new one, so the whole conversation stays in one place with the person handling it.
- Does it reply to customers automatically?
- It drafts an acknowledgement for each new ticket, and you choose whether those are sent automatically. Anything sensitive, commercial or unclear is held for a person to check first, along with its acknowledgement.
- How are SLAs worked out?
- From each customer's own contract where you have one, rather than a single default for everyone. The clock starts when the email arrives and the ticket shows how long is left.
- How long does it take to set up?
- Connecting the mailbox, creating a queue and adding your team takes under an hour. Loading your customers and contracts takes longer and depends on how much you bring with you.
- Can we see who handled what?
- Yes. Every email, AI decision, assignment and status change is written to an append-only audit log, so each ticket has a timestamped record of when the request arrived and when it was answered.
See it on your own mailbox
Connecting a shared mailbox takes under an hour, and your customers will not notice anything has changed.